


Time and Tide [Don't wait for it]

by astrokath



Category: xkcd, xkcd 1190 (Time)
Genre: Bad Art, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, Siblings, Worldbuilding, meta if you squint hard, xkcd 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-04 23:14:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1086811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrokath/pseuds/astrokath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knew they'd survive. They might not know where they were, but she knew they could figure it out, together.</p><p>That was then.</p><p>This is now.</p><p>Now, it's all down to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue - River and Sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Traykor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Traykor/gifts).



> For traykor, who requested pre- or post-canon back-story and suggested that I go wild. Despite my best intentions, I'm afraid it turned out less fluffy and more angst-ridden (and longer!) than I was expecting, but I hope there's enough of what you were hoping for inside it somewhere.  
> Enourmous thanks to blueyeti, who did a fantastic job of beta-reading the vast majority of it.

There used to be a river.

She'd lived her entire life beside it, and even now that it was gone the details still came easily to mind. A slow, silt-laden stretch of water that crept across the dried-up land towards the sea each year, bearing eels and fish and frogs and the waterlogged wealth of the hills. It followed the shape of the land, spreading wide as it met the flatlands near the shore, turning dirt into mud into marsh and irrigating their simple crops. The tents would move back and forth along the last few miles of the river's length, as the river-people farmed and fished and salvaged and crafted, while the plains threw up grasses and flowers. Early each spring the raft-traders would come, to barter cloth and metal for salt and fish and reeds. And after them, every year when the river reached the sea, the hill-people would descend to the plains, driving their ever-hungry goats before them.

The river-people would move their tents to the middle of the marsh when the hill-people came, guarding the crossings to the riches of sea and salt-pans, and the truer wealth of homes and families: all the more precious because of how few of them there were. Forty wasn't enough, not really, not when the hill-people came in greater numbers every year, not when the only young person close to her in age was her own brother. So she watched the river almost as closely as she watched the sea, learning how it worked, quite certain that she'd travel far enough to see the other end of it one day, somewhere far from sea and hills both.

Someone would have to go first, to find a new place along a different part of the river. Somewhere the river-people could live peacefully, with other people – people who weren't hill-people – that they could live _with_. There were castles out there, her father had once told her, rising tall and strong in the lands beyond the hills. Castles of stone, castles of wood, castles of metal and frozen sand, castles of water and air. She'd see them one day, she'd promised herself, but she hadn't been in any hurry to leave her home. It was a good land, a good life, and she wasn't ready to change either one.

So when the changes did come, when the entire sea began to rise, it wasn't something that either she or her brother could ignore. She'd still been trying to understand what it might be like to leave a place – a home – forever, never to see it again except in her memory. But what if home stopped being what it was, what if it changed so much that her memories became lies? What then?

The question haunted her. Her home was gone. The land was still there, somewhere far beneath the sea, but very much changed from what it was. The water, too, but it certainly wasn't a river any more.

She'd grown up beside that river, believing she understood it, all of it encompassed by simple relationships of season and scale. The more water there was, the more river there was, running longer or faster or higher than before. She didn't – couldn't – think that way any more, not after witnessing what a flood could be when it was more than something that happened every spring, more than a symptom of particularly bad weather.

She'd always expected to see the river's end one day, but she never thought it would end the way it had: in water.

It still didn't make sense to her – how could it be possible to destroy a thing simply by adding _more_ of it? – but, as uncomfortable as it was, the idea just wouldn't leave her. It reminded her of the warning her mother once gave her, on a day when she had asked too many questions.

_Keep asking questions about everything you don't understand, and one day you won't understand anything at all._

 

 

 

There used to be a sea, too.

The river was long gone, but no-one could deny that the sea was still there.

Except that it wasn't.

It was a strange contradiction. Oh, the sea was _there_ – that morning it was as grey and flat as the sky, and so cold that her bare feet had already grown numb and painful – but the familiar shape of _sea_ in her mind, of that seemingly endless, open expanse of water, was very much changed from what it used to be.

The old sea had been shallow, warm and calm: a fluid, blue-green bridge between the sky above and the cool, golden sand slipping between her toes. You could wade out so far that friends and family on the shoreline became lost against the backdrop of the dunes or indistinguishable from the pillars and mounds on the salt-flats, until the whole world became narrowed down to water and light alone, glaring sun-bright and salt-white.

She used to lie back and float in it, resting securely within the simple, soothing warmth for a minute or an hour or a lifetime, her mind free of all meaningful thoughts until she waded back to the shore again, emerging wrinkled and rimed with salt, water streaming from the heaviness of her legs and dripping from her hair. That would be when the questions returned to her, while the wet sand and the sea behind her swallowed every last trace of her small and human footsteps.

The questions would vary, in a way that the sea itself did not. Why the sky was blue, what shadows were made of, where the sea-birds came from and where they went. Some days, she'd found herself wondering why the hill-people couldn't leave the river-people alone, and whether there were friendlier people living further away. Who else the salt-traders visited, and what it was like in the land where her young cousin's odd hat had come from. If the people from beyond the hills really did live in castles, if those castles were anything like the ones that her father had taught her and her brother to build out of sand. Had any of those people ever met her father? Did any of _them_ know what had become of him? And what would she find if she ever found a real castle, and went inside? What would it be like to live in a home made of stone, hard and firm and never-changing, one that you couldn't easily rearrange to better suit yourself or the seasons?

Sometimes, she used to wonder who she was, and what she would become when she left the world she knew behind her. How much it would hurt to leave; how persistently her home would pull her back again.

And sometimes, perhaps inevitably, her questions would be of water and river and the sea itself. Why the mazed waterways of the marshes were so different from one year to the next. Where the seawater went after leaving the sand. Where the water in the river came from... and how all of the rivers, running seasonally or all year round, could flow and flow and flow and never make any appreciable change to the sea itself at all.

At least, not until the year of the new sea, the year of the flood, when the sea had grown and changed, swallowing anything and everything as it drowned the only world she'd ever known.

She hadn't known much, back then. Now, even less. She and her brother might have learned a lot on their journey – they'd gone looking for such knowledge, well aware that it would only add to their questions and delighting in it every time it happened – but of all the many answers she'd found along the way, not one of them could ever replace everything she'd lost.

Cold and aching, she stared out at the sea and wondered what it was that made it so hungry, and if she would ever understand it.

And then, if she would ever see her brother again.

 

 


	2. Time and Tide

**I**

The path ended in the water.

She'd been hoping that it would lead somewhere else: another abandoned village, if she was lucky. There were ruins scattered all over the place: the whole landscape was riddled with them, and in some places they were layered one atop another. All of them were different, all were long dead. The paths weren't...and the people who had _made_ the paths must have lived somewhere _,_ before the new sea rose and claimed all but the hills for itself. But after over a month of exploration, she'd convinced herself that this part of the world was now an island.

She'd left the camp mid-morning, heading for the tallest of the hills to the north. The grass on the hills was short, but not as short as it would have been if there were still animals around to graze it. The sun was almost at its highest when she happened across the path, curving across the land between hills and coast. She followed it northwards and upwards for a while, past weed-filled, empty fields lined by fences of stone and wood and peculiarly thin lengths of metal past tall trees occupied by mobs of birds, cawing...but all too soon she found herself following the slope of the landscape back, inevitably, to the sea.

She might have stopped walking much sooner than she did – she had been able to _see_ the sea at that point, had seen exactly where her path would end – but this part of the world was new, not somewhere that she'd explored before, and that alone was reason enough to keep moving. The path was old, well-worn, and wide enough for hand-carts, with marker-stones embedded in the ground beside it. She couldn't read the script – though the words were so worn that she'd have struggled to comprehend them even if she _had_ been familiar with the language – but the number system the stone-makers used was simple enough to decipher. Once, not so long ago, she might have walked along that path and found people and a town at the end of it, near enough that she could have been back with her own family and friends again well before dusk.

She passed a rusted opened gate, creaking restlessly on its hinges in the wind. Beyond it, the path became lined at its verge with hard, greying pats of manure and then dipped steeply down to an obviously ancient bridge across a fast-flowing stream. The bridge was a single, simple span of stone, smoothly worn on the top, green with slimy moss beneath, and circled with lichen everywhere else. On the far side, the path took a sharp turn to the right, running between a low stone wall and the racing watercourse for all of another twenty paces before water, path and wall disappeared into the foaming waters of the sea.

Everything seemed to end in the sea, these days. The sea was the end of everything.

She crouched down a few paces from the breaking waves and touched the wet dirt. The tide was on the turn, but the sea had been there long enough now that the path and the grass and everything else that used to be there had gone. The plants rotting, the soil washed away, unearthing stones and roots for the confused sea-creatures that were only just discovering the drowned lands for themselves. There _had_ been a village there once, not too far away...but now it would be home for fish and eels and the occasional diving bird instead of people.

She looked out to sea, wondering if it might be close enough to swim to, and how far it was beneath the surface of the water. If it was close enough, she might have stripped off her clothes and made a diving bird of herself, but she couldn't see any sign of the place. She hadn't really expected to, not if she'd been right about the numbers on the marker-stones.

Standing, she turned her attention to the dozen or so trees on the far side of the wall. They were growing in two neat rows, spaced almost twice their own gnarled and stunted height apart, their branches drooping with the weight of countless small red fruits, except where the boughs had been propped up with stakes. There was a larger tree beyond them, taller and older, close to the water's edge. She thought it was of a type with the others: it seemed to have grown into the same kind of shape and its bark was the same shade of wrinkled grey-brown, but its branches were dead and bare. She could smell rotting, fallen fruit all around, she realised, all mixed up with the smell of the sea and the wreckage that washed up with every tide. There had been no harvest that year, and swarms of insects buzzed around the bounty lying at the base of each neglected tree. She clambered up onto the wall, to get a better look, startling a flock of small brown birds briefly into flight. The trees' leaves were the same shade: drab and lifeless. She'd seen the same thing everywhere along the coast, autumn arriving far earlier than she thought the trees were used to. It might have been the way the seawater seeped into the ground and lapped at their roots, or the salt that was left behind by the waves. Change had come too fast for the trees.

Treading carefully over the windfalls, she filled her bag with the freshest and least bruised of the low-hanging fruit. “I'm sorry there aren't more of me,” she told the trees. They'd carried the weight of those fruits for months and months, but without people to take them, all that effort would go to waste.

When she was done, she walked back down towards the water and climbed partway up the dead tree.

“Are you out there?” she whispered, but the sea didn't answer.

The horizon was a blue-grey blur; she might have been staring at nothing at all. It was giddying. She grabbed hold of the branch above her, steadying herself and wishing that she hadn't climbed quite so high. Beneath her, the waves breaking on the muddy shoreline were dirty and thick with debris: tangles of grass and dead leaves and branches, half-rotted fruits and pale yellow froth. A little further to the east, they lapped against a shapeless, twisted lump of grey fabric, lifting it slightly with each movement of the water...like a beating heart that had been torn from where it belonged, and left exposed and useless on the ground. She stared at it, wondering what it had once been.

And then it moved again...but not with the waves.

A person, not a thing, she realised, scrambling hastily back down to the ground. A living person, and not of her own people – the first she'd seen in weeks. A man, dressed in pale, salt-stained clothes, a man who turned his head and looked at her. His heart was definitely still beating, and exactly where it ought to be. _Hers_ seemed to be trying to climb up out of her chest and into her throat.

For one too-short moment, she thought – hoped – that it might be her brother.

But it wasn't.

 

  


**II**

She spent the rest of the day making camp and gathering supplies. The stranger was weak and thirsty, and in no state to walk anywhere. If he'd been in better health, she'd have counted that a good thing – she knew who he was and where he'd come from, and those two facts were more than enough to keep him far, far away from her people – but as badly injured as he was, she wished she'd found him close enough to home to fetch more help for him.

The worst of his wounds was a deep gash on his leg, enough to stop him from walking anywhere all by itself: the skin around it was discoloured, taut and warm, and she worried that it was already too late to do much about it. She cleaned it as well as she could with water from the stream – seawater would have been better, if the new sea hadn't been full of dying things – and let him drink as much as he wished, before moving him to the lee side of the wall around the trees. Starting a fire took longer. There was plenty of dead wood on the ground, but most of it was damp.

The stranger babbled at her while she worked, and although she was sure she understood most of the words he used, taken as a whole they made very little sense. By the time the sun went down, all she knew was that he was lost, very confused and desperately worried about the rest of his people. She gave him more water, but he had no appetite for her food, so she built up the fire and watched in silence as his shivers died away and he drifted into sleep. His skin was still far too warm, even where it was shielded from the heat of the fire, and she found herself wishing yet again that she'd stolen some ointment from the people in the castle all those weeks ago, instead of just their maps. Ointment would have been useful. The maps had helped a lot when they'd needed them most, but the world and the sea had changed far too much since then. They needed different maps now, different tools, different guides to lead them through the darkness. Only the stars were the same, the stars and the half-lit face of the moon: a bright, fat crescent high in the sky to the south.

Turning her back on the moon, she closed her eyes against her tears.

It had been a full month since she'd last seen her brother.

 

  


**III**

It had been warm, that day. Not as warm as the shore of the old sea had been, but more than warm enough after a morning spent hiking up and down hills, through metal-boned ruins and fields and overgrown woodland, searching for the people whose fires they'd seen sending streamers of smoke into evening sky. She and her brother had both been sweating hard by the time they'd found them: five men, two women and a child of ten or so years. They had dogs with them, smaller and less fierce-looking than those the hill-people kept, and they were using them to herd several dozen thick-coated animals down a track towards an enclosure.

Not wanting to startle either the people or their animals, she and her brother had stopped at the edge of the trees that bordered the strangers' farmland, and waited for them to finish their work. The strangers' language was heavily accented and hard to understand above the noise of the animals, but the rhythm of the words felt right, and she and her brother both thought that they'd got the gist of what was being said as the strangers slowly brought their reluctant and skittish animals under control. More promising by far was the way the words were used: with good-humoured frustration and obvious camaraderie.

So, when the last of the animals was finally penned, she and her brother had thought nothing of stepping out from the shadows of the trees and calling out a greeting.

Events moved very fast after that.

The dogs had moved even faster.

Part of her had wanted to stand her ground, to make the strangers see that she and her brother weren't the threat that they'd obviously been mistaken for, to resolve whatever misunderstanding had come out of so simple a statement as “Hello? We saw your fires.” But whatever it was that had gone wrong, an even larger part of her knew that any answers they might find in the company of angry animals with sharp teeth probably weren't worth knowing. How fast you could run away from such animals, how long you could keep running...yes, it was far more sensible to concentrate on those.

There'd been a brief, terrifying moment when she'd reached the far side of the woods and found herself back amongst the ruins. She'd turned to check how close her brother was behind her – she'd always been the faster runner – and found no sign of him at all, just two dogs. The nearest was far too close: she screamed as it leapt for her, and swung her pack at its head. Pack and dog went flying, and the animal whimpered in pain, but she didn't stay to see if it would go for her again. She clambered up and over a wall, just in time to see her brother sprinting towards a gap between buildings. She called out his name, and he stumbled to a halt.

“Wrong way!” she shouted.

He shook his head and beckoned her on. “This way's better! Trust me!”

There wasn't time to argue. By the time they'd reached the brackish wetlands that lay to the east of the ruins, she'd seen the sense of his idea. Maybe they couldn't see the animals chasing them any more, but some animals didn't need to see you to follow over dry ground. Wet ground was different. The hill-people's dogs had never been much good for sniffing out paths in the marshes. No, it was better to take the long way back, over terrain that she and her brother were used to: the strangers might know the land far better than they did, but the sea had made big changes to the lower-lying parts of it.

The ground grew slowly dryer, rising up from the marshes into gently undulating hills, lined with neat rows of vines. There was no sign of any pursuit, but that was no reason not to be cautious, so they angled back towards their camp equally slowly, following the curve of the land. Eventually, parts of it started to look familiar.

“I think we'll see our wood once we're on the other side of that one,” her brother said, pointing at the steep rise ahead of them, and the solitary tree standing sentinel at the top. “I recognise that tree.”

“Me too,” she said. “But if it is, we've come much further west that I thought.”

Muddy and sweating, they made their way up the hill. She was first to reach the top – her brother had stopped half-way to take a closer look at the vines. There weren't any on the far side of the hill, just more grass and, at the bottom of the slope, the sea: a broad inlet of rippling water that had surely once been a wide valley. The water was calmer than it had been in days, reflecting the blue of the sky, except towards the far shore where it darkened around the tops of the drowned trees that were tall enough to break the surface. Their own camp was on the higher ground a little way beyond them.

“I see our wood!” she called out to her brother.

“Is it far?”

“A little. We're on the wrong side of the water.” She waited for him to reach the top as well, then handed him back his water bottle. “Thirsty? I saved some for you.”

“Thanks.” He drank the last of the water, then put the bottle back inside his pack.

“I think we should stop here for a while,” she suggested. “There's not much shade the rest of the way.”

“Good idea.”

She walked across to the tree and sat down beneath it. “Ow!”

“What's wrong?”

“I sat on something.” The soil all around her was peppered with the small, hard kernels of whatever fruit the tree had dropped earlier in the season. She stretched one of her hands beneath her and scrabbled in the dirt, brushing aside as many of them as she could. “Tree-stones. Lots of them. We should come back here next year when there's still some fruit around them.”

Her brother sat down beside her and stared silently back the way they'd walked. “If we're still here. Those dogs were _nasty._ ”

“I hope they don't follow us.”

He turned the branch he'd been using as a walking stick around and held it out to her. “One of them tried to bite me. It got this instead.”

She brushed away the drying mud at the bottom end of the branch, and traced the splintered indentations of the animal's fangs with her fingers. They weren't very widely spaced, but they were certainly deep. “They're strong, to bite so hard. I hit one with my pack. That's when I lost it. You were lucky.”

“I know. I think we both were.” He sighed, and chucked a handful of the fruit-stones down the slope. “I don't think the people who live here are going to want us to stay. These are their fields. Their trees. Their vines. And I don't think they want to share them.”

She didn't think so either. “They could, easily. There aren't that many of us, and there don't seem to be many of them, either.”

“We don't know how many there are. We didn't see many, but we didn't have much chance to look properly.”

“No, but look at all the ruins we've found, all the empty places that people used to live. The sea might have covered most of it, but there's still more than enough land for us and them.” Some of the ruins had been far stranger than others, but all of them were old and long abandoned. “Maybe we can change their minds?” she tried. “They sounded nice, at first. Before they set their dogs on us. They can't be _all_ bad.”

Her brother shook his head. “Minds are the last things to change.”

She sighed, and pushed herself back to her feet. “It isn't fair. We used to have a place of our own.”

“We can make a new place.”

“I used to think we could make one _anywhere_ ,” she said softly. “I'm not sure I do any more. Everywhere's going to be like this, everywhere we go. The sea's filled up the whole world, and the only places left are the hills, and the only people we'll find will be hill-people. They've never liked us. This is their place. Not ours.”

“Of course it isn't ours!”

She looked down to find her brother grinning up at her.

“Have you seen any castles yet?”

She smiled back at him and shook her head.

 

  


 

**IV**

She'd woken the next morning to find her brother gone.

She went to the cook-fire first, and asked if anyone had seen him. Apparently, he'd been up and about well before her, and after fetching water from the stream he'd gone off in search of more firewood. The nights were cold, and they were going through it fast, but as far as excuses went that one was about as implausible as possible: they were still working their way through the trees they'd felled to make room for their camp. “Firewood?” she asked drily.  
  
“That's what he said,” her uncle answered between mouthfuls of breakfast. “Is he not back yet?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Oh well! You know what he's like,” her aunt added. She lifted the pan of porridge away from the fire and set it down on the ground. “Hungry, girl?”

She shook her head. “I've got some fruit.”

“He probably thought of something else to look for,” her uncle suggested. “But he didn't take any food with him today, so I'm sure he'll be back when he gets hungry.”  
  
That was true enough, but... “It's not like him to go alone!”  
  
Her aunt rolled her eyes disparagingly. “The pair of you have always been off out and about more than you should; I don't know _what_ your parents would say if they were here. Just look at the example you're setting for the other young people! Though if you're finally ready to take on a share of everyone else's worries, I'd say it's well past time!”  
  
She _had_ been worried, but now she was annoyed as well. “You'd rather we stayed in camp with the rest of you, would you? What would you be cooking right now if we had? Sticks? Leaves?”  
  
“Now that's uncalled for!”  
  
“Fine!” She turned her back on them both and walked away. “I'm off to find some firewood,” she lied. “I'll be back when I'm hungry.”  
  
As soon as she was out of sight of the fire, she started to run. She was afraid that she knew exactly where her brother had gone. Back to where the strangers were, to find the bag of supplies she'd dropped, and to see if anyone had come after the pair of them. She'd been thinking of persuading some of the others to help them answer the second question, but she'd already given up on the bag as lost. He wouldn't have, not if he was out there on his own. A single person could stay unseen more easily, could get much closer than a group could.  
  
She wondered how much of a head start he had, and how quickly he'd be moving. Whether he'd backtracked along their own path, or if he'd taken a more direct route. She couldn't know for sure, but whatever route he'd taken she knew she'd need to approach the strangers' lands as carefully as she could. She kept to the trees whenever possible; her pace was slower than it might have been on open ground, but on such a bright morning she knew she wouldn't be easily seen.

Eventually, she found herself approaching the ruins again. She clambered through one of the strange cobweb-like fences and paused to look around. It would be the third time she'd passed through them, and they still looked wrong to her eyes: nothing at all like the first ruin they'd come across, on the day they'd first arrived. That one had made _sense_ , despite its advanced state of decay. A wall of red stone rising to no higher than her hips, overgrown with green moss and briars and the feathery brown leaves that dominated the woodland undergrowth. The building would have been half the size of a decent tent once, back when it had had four full walls instead of only two and a half. The strange, straight contours of the ground suddenly became meaningful: not the roots of trees, but the roots of people's lives, long abandoned and buried by the land. But the other ruins they'd found were quite different: buildings made of something that she could best liken to hardened sand, stained with colour on the outside, a material that crumbled and flaked away to pale dust when you scratched at it. They had bones, those ruins: corroded ropes of metal, rising like saplings in some places, and lying fallen and twisted amongst the debris in others.

The ruins were quiet, and just as deserted as they'd been the day before. There was no sign that her brother had been there before her, neither amongst the old, tumbledown buildings nor in the woodlands beyond them, and no sign of the pack she'd dropped, either. She kept walking until the trees gave way to grass again. The enclosure the strangers had herded their animals into was empty.

And then she smelled the smoke.

At first, she thought that it was just someone's camp-fire. Still keeping to the trees, she made her way steadily up the valley. The further she walked, the stronger the smell became. The daylight didn't seem quite as strong as it should have been, as if it was being dimmed far more than the obscuration of leaf and bough and undergrowth could account for. Treading carefully, she moved back towards the open fields. She was still passing between the last of the trees when she saw it: a thick column of smoke rising from somewhere beyond the next rise, thickening and spreading as the morning's light breeze dragged it heavily over the land.  
  
Something _big_ was burning.  
  
She hurried onwards in the open, no longer caring about concealment. That could have been a mistake, she realised, when she found the first bodies: one of the strangers and two of their dogs, and neither the man nor the animals had died easily. The ground around them was trampled; clear sign that a large number of people had passed recently through. She wanted to scream her brother's name, or run away...but instead, she continued onwards, following the tracks through the grass. The usual noises of the land were still present: birds singing, the rustle of small animals in the undergrowth, and the occasional crack that almost certainly came from the fires. She was close enough by then to tell that there was definitely more than one of them, and it wasn't long before she saw them. The strangers had built their homes out of wood, and each and every one of them was burning. When the fires died, there wouldn't even be any ruins left behind.

She searched the burning village for survivors, coughing hard whenever the wind turned and sent the smoke of the fires her way. There were drag-marks on the ground and far too many signs of fighting and death. The attackers had removed anything of value and, except for the bodies, they'd burned the rest. She forced herself to check each one, to confirm to herself that her brother wasn't one of them.

Later, sad and sickened, she left the ashes of the strangers' village behind her and followed the trampled ground all the way down to the coast of the new sea. The mud close to the water's edge was deeply gouged where boats had been drawn up out of the water. Shielding her eyes from the sun, she squinted out at the sea, but whoever had attacked the strangers' village was already long gone.  
  
Not everything the tide washed up was good.

 

  


 

**V**

She was startled awake by the sound of the stranger's voice. His lilting syllables were low and slurred, so she moved closer to hear them better, hoping that they might make more sense than they had the day before. “What did you say?” she asked

“It was you,” the stranger croaked, and then, quieter, “I'm sorry. Where...people?”

Was he asking after his people, or hers? “Your people?” she asked. “I don't know. We found a village, but there's no-one there now.” She left it at that; if he didn't know what had happened to his people, there was no reason to break his heart with it any sooner than she had to.

“We shouldn't have chased you away. We should have listened. But we thought you were _them_.”

“I think you were right to be afraid of them.” Whoever _they_ were – a question she was hoping would stay forever unanswered. She reached across and pressed the back of her hand against his brow. A night of rest had made much more of a difference to his health than she'd expected it would. He still felt far too warm, but not as bad as he had done. “Do you need anything? More water?”

“Please.”

She went to re-fill her water bottle at the stream. On her return, she found the stranger sitting up with her pack in his lap, eating one of the fruits that she'd filled her pack with. “I've got some bread as well,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

“Very.”

She took her pack back and felt inside for the last of her bread. It was slightly squashed and more than a little stale, so she softened it with some of the water before handing bread and bottle both over to the stranger. “How else are you feeling? Is your leg still hurting badly?”

“I'm alive,” he mumbled. “Didn't expect to be.

“Do you think you can walk?”

He took a large mouthful of bread and frowned thoughtfully while he chewed. “I don't know. How far?”

If he had to ask, then the answer was almost certainly _too far._ “Maybe it would be better if I went for help. If you don't mind being left alone, I could be back here by mid afternoon.”

He made a disbelieving noise. “Why would you come back?”

“A stranger helped _me_ once.”

“And _we_ chased you away. Twice.”

“That's- wait, twice?” She felt chilled and excited all at once. That someone had seen her brother the day he'd disappeared could only give her hope, but with everything that had happened to the strangers' village.... “You saw him! You saw my brother, didn't you?”

The stranger frowned again. “He was your brother? The young man who tried to warn us that they were coming?”

“Yes!” She could feel her eyes starting to sting. Of course he'd have tried to help them, if he'd known they were in trouble “Please, do you know what happened to him?”

The stranger gave her a long, considering look – as if he, too, needed time to decide how much bad news he could afford to give her. “They took him – not with the rest of us, so I don't know when or how, but we all ended up together in the end. He had a tool they hadn't found, and we used it to escape. He said he would help us, but he wasn't very good at fighting. And then he...he got in the water and he didn't drown in it! We all thought he would, but he didn't!”

“The sea isn't easy to float in any more – not like rafts and boats can – but you can still swim in it if you try.” Her brother had been practising, ever since the flood.

“Swim? Is that the word for what he did? It all looked a lot like drowning to us, but he kept moving his arms and legs, and we watched him until he got all the way to the other floating house, and he climbed up the side and that was the last I saw of him. I think he went to help the other people who'd been taken. Later, after it got dark, we heard screams and shouts across the water. But when the sun rose again, the other house was gone, and ours was stuck. We'd floated into a forest. A forest in the middle of the sea.”

“And then?”

The stranger lay back down on the ground and closed his eyes. He drew in a shuddering breath and chuckled miserably. “So much water, everywhere, and everyone dying of thirst!”

“Oh.”

“The others broke the water-barrels before we killed them. We didn't understand why, not until it was too late. It rained, once, but we'd already started drinking the sea and other things we shouldn't. And then it rained harder, when we were all too weak to care. Such a storm it was, and it tore the floating house apart, and broke it to pieces on all the drowned trees. And then it drowned us, too. Except for me.” He fell silent for a long while, and when he spoke again it was in little more than a whisper. “I don't know where your brother is now, where the sea took him. But if I'm still alive, maybe he is, too.”

 

  


**VI**

It took the best part of another month to build the raft. She worked on it as often as she could, when she knew she wouldn't be missed for a few hours, helped by her cousin and later on by the stranger whenever an extra pair of hands were needed and they all had time to spare. It wasn't ideal, but she knew full well that a small raft built in slow secrecy close to the water's edge would be finished far sooner than any less-secret raft that she would have been forbidden to build at all. Finally, it was done. Three layers of wood lashed together with fine rope scavenged from the rows of vines; thinner branches woven into a flexible wall that she could move around to screen her from the waves and the weather; a hollow to rest in lined with greased leather; and two long, straight branches with broad leaves of wood wedged into one end, that she hoped would work as well as the ones the stranger had described to her. The sea was ever so big, far too deep to reach the bottom of with a pole, and she didn't think it cared much about where it pushed things. So, she'd have to push her raft herself. She was sure that she could do it – pushing against the water itself shouldn't be so much more difficult than pushing against a riverbed. What she _wasn't_ sure of was where she should be pushing herself _to._

“You're really going to do it, aren't you?” her cousin said. Her tone was as unforgiving as it was soft. “You don't even know where to start looking!”

She shook her head. “Maybe not. But I've been watching the sea a lot. You can't _see_ any paths on it, but it still likes to move more some ways than others, and the land on the far side doesn't look _that_ far away. The wind on the other side of the island blows mostly the right way as well.”

“Away from here. You're going to go away and leave us all again.”

“We came back last time.”

“Last time, you walked. It's easy to turn around when you're walking somewhere. I don't think it's going to be easy to come back from where-”

“Even if we hadn't, you'd still have been alright!” she interrupted before either of them could follow that thought any further than they already had. “You didn't need _my_ help to turn our castle into a raft, to save everyone from the flood.”

That was beside the point, and both of them knew it.

“You didn't say goodbye last time, either,” her cousin said, even quieter than before. She nudged the raft with her foot, and set it rocking in the water. “You promised you wouldn't do that again.”

She wrapped her arms around her cousin and hugged her close. “I'm saying it to you now, aren't I?”

“And that's the problem!” the girl wailed.

With all of her precocious self-sufficiency, it was all too easy at times to forget how young her cousin really was – and how much they both needed each other.

“You're saying _goodbye_ ,” her cousin continued, “and I know you have food and the steam bottle, fish-hooks and rope and everything else you need to survive out there, but if you thought you'd be coming back again, you'd take me with you! You know I can look after myself just as well as you can, but you don't actually believe that'll be enough, not inside. Part of you thinks you're going to die out there, and it's the smart part of you, the part that asks questions and answers them, not the sensible part that's normally afraid of all the stupid things you do. The sensible-you is just lying to both of us, because this time you're being really, _really_ stupid and it's too afraid to do anything else.”

“Oh.” She hugged her cousin tighter, and let out a long, slow sigh. “I guess I am. Do you hate me for it?”

The girl gave a slight shake of her head. “No. I think I'm going to lie to myself too, when you're gone. And then I'm going to learn how to make a _better_ raft, and how the sea really works, and one day I'll surprise you both. One day.”

“You surprise me every day. You're amazing. Promise me you'll never stop being amazing.”

Sniffing back her tears, her cousin said nothing.

“I know it won't be nice,” she continued, “telling the others what I've done. I know it isn't fair to ask you to do that for me...but he's my brother, and if there's any chance that he's still out there somewhere, I have to at least _try_ to find him.” She smiled down at her cousin as a thought she'd been chasing for days finally came within her grasp, as bright and colourful as the flying beetles she'd seen in the hills. “No, I don't know where the sea will take me. It's all too big for that...but the world is bigger than us wherever we are, and I won't be alone or afraid just because you and the others are somewhere that I'm not. And I don't know what I _will_ find out there, but whatever I find, I know that it'll be big and strange and wonderful. The whole world is big and strange and wonderful.”

“Just like you.”

“Just like both of us. Just like everyone.”

  


**VII**

She wasn't sure, at first. The light was low, and the shoreline was littered with confusing shapes, distorted by the shadows of the wooded slopes behind them. She'd already passed by several fallen buildings half-swallowed by the sea, then a sheer rocky outcrop marked with the same script she'd seen on the marker-stones back on the island, and there were tumbled piles of driftwood and debris almost everywhere. In the ten days she'd spent working her way down the coastline, she'd had more than one false hope dashed. But as the wind took her ever closer to the land again, she started to notice details that didn't seem quite so natural. The mound that had caught her eye was was the _only_ such pile along a fair stretch of coast, and even from a distance it seemed a lot more _shaped_ than the others she'd seen. But the wind was shifting, and the currents were against her; as hard as she worked her oars, she found herself being carried her towards the far side of the bay.

Eventually, she won her battle against the elements and was able to bring her raft to a grinding halt against the rocky ground, in one of the few parts of the coastline that wasn't completely overgrown with dying and dead trees. She lowered herself carefully into the knee-deep water, and wondered what to do about the raft – the tide-marks on the ground weren't that far from where the waves were breaking, but they were breaking hard and the rocks were larger and more numerous than she'd expected. In the end, she settled for dragging the raft a little further down the shoreline, to where the rocks gave way to mud and tree-stumps. She secured it as well as she could, gathered her boots and her packs, then started back down the coast. It was already starting to grow dark by then, so she turned inland at the first small stream she found, and set up camp as soon as the ground grew dry. She watched the sun set behind the hills on the far side of the bay, while a thin streamer of smoke struggled upwards through the sand-pale sky to join the darkening fish-scale clouds.  
  
She passed a sleepless night, and was up and walking again well before dawn, scrambling through the tangles of forest and boggy ground. Some stretches were almost impassable; several times, she considered backtracking to her raft, but with the water just as thick with submerged trees and debris as the land was, she knew she'd only lose more time that way. In the end, she was forced to cut inland, to the higher ground. The sky grew more heavily clouded, and without the sun to guide her she became half convinced that she'd lost her way when she found a watercourse heading across her path in what she was sure was the wrong direction. She followed it down-slope until it ended in a boggy dell, then backtracked the way she'd came, up to the crest of a hill and down the other side again. Beyond the next rise, she found herself in sight of the sea again: the bay she'd crossed the day before, shining sunlit in the distance beneath a patchwork sky that the wind was steadily stripping of clouds. She made her way down to the water and scanned the coast to the west for the structure she'd seen the previous day. There was no sign of it at all – nothing that wasn't fallen trees and rocks, anyway – and she was starting to doubt that she'd ever seen it at all when the thought occurred to her that she might simply have walked too far. She turned back to the east and started along the shore. A sheer promontory hid the way ahead, but as she drew closer she recognised it as one she'd seen before: there were the markings, daubed in person-height letters close to its top.

Beneath it, she saw something new.

There'd been a rockfall, recently – not content with devouring what it had already claimed, the sea seemed to be intent on chewing away at the rest of the world, too – and at the base of the scarred cliff, someone had marked two shapes onto the rock with chalk.

The first shape was an arrow, pointing further east. The second shape was a castle, no doubt about it. It was _their_ castle, she was sure of it – not exactly alike, but more than close enough after accounting for the limitations of her brother's skill in that area. Smiling through her tears, she started to run.

The _real_ castle wasn't much further at all – just a short distance beyond the headland. Long pieces of driftwood had been tied together to make two three-legged supports for a cross beam and the layered branches that formed the bulk of the shelter, while thinner branches had been tied and cut to shape to form a profile that both of them would recognise easily. It wasn't much, but it was enough.

She called her brother's name, and when he didn't answer straight away, she shouted it instead. And then, a much loved and long-missed face appeared above the castle's saw-toothed wall, and yelled her own name back at her.

  


**VIII**

“I knew you'd find me.”

It was the fifth or sixth time he'd said that – she'd already lost count – but she couldn't really blame him for repeating herself. It still didn't seem quite real that she'd found him at all. So much had been stacked against him, quite aside from the unlikeliness of everything that she herself had done: all the chaos of the day that the strangers' village had been destroyed, there and during the fights on the water; the day and a half he'd spent drifting in a barrel, wondering where he'd float next; the hungry week he'd spent alone before tracking down the other survivors; and the second time he'd almost drowned, when the raft he'd built and set out to sea upon had foundered close to the shore. That, at least, answered the question of why he hadn't come back by himself, why he'd _needed_ to be found.

Grinning at him, she repeated her own answer from before. “You built a _castle_. I wouldn't have found you half as fast if you hadn't.”

“That was the idea. It was either this or another raft.” He stretched one arm out to the side and tugged at some of the tree-creeper he'd used to lash the rickety structure together. It came loose easily in his hand. “I probably shouldn't have trusted the _first_ one.”

She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. “I'm not sure my own raft will be much better.” The sea might have been happy enough to bring them both to the same part of the world, but returning to one small island in the middle of the ocean would be a much harder thing to do. “We could fetch my raft and work our way up the coast, and try the sea again when we think we're close enough. Or go further on, and hope that the currents will make things easier for us.”

“We'd be much further from the island. We might get pushed somewhere else. The sea is big, and we can't use the steam bottle if we can't start a fire.”

He was right, of course. The sea had brought them both to the coast, but there was much, much more of it in every other direction. She'd studied the maps she'd stolen often enough to know that...and if they tried to reach their island and _missed_ it, they could easily drift for days. They could probably drift for _months_. “Maybe it's not such a good idea. I don't even know if my raft is still where I left it. What would we do if it's not? Where do we go then?”

He looked away, thoughtfully, to the north. “There are people in the hills, not far from here. Most of the people who lived here before the sea rose left for even higher places, but some of them stayed, just like on the island we ended up on. They've taken in a lot of strangers since the sea rose, and they've already told me I could join them if I wanted to.”

She poked at the embers of their fire with a stick, sending a spray of sparks rising into the air, and wondered why she didn't feel happier that they already had an easy road ahead of them. Finding a friendly community for the winter was the best choice – the only choice, really – but somehow it just didn't feel _right,_ not after everything that had happened, all the lows of the past few months and the highs of the last few hours. She tried to imagine their own hill-people making such an invitation, and failed. “Hill-people? What are they like?”

“Much friendlier than _our_ hill-people were. Welcoming. Patient.” He paused, as if considering what else to say. “A bit...strange? They all wear hats all the time, even inside, but it is a lot colder in this part of the world. They gave me clothes and food after I found them, but they wouldn't give me any rope for a raft. They said it was against the One True something-or-other, and that I'd be better off just waiting for something to happen and accepting it when it did, just like they do.” His forehead creased into a frown. “Huh. Maybe they were right about that.”

“I think they're lucky they live as high up as they do, if they think like that. ' _Not being wrong isn't the same as being_ right _',_ ” she added in as good an impression of their mother's voice as she could manage.

Her brother's lips quirked into a half-smile. “Yeah.”

“I don't have any better ideas,” she confessed with a sigh. “Not yet, anyway. But there'll be lots to see and learn in the hills. New ways of baking bread, and mending socks, and telling stories about other people's lives.” All far better ways of spending her time than questioning the world around her, if her mother's advice was to be believed. On the other side of the fire, her brother gave her a look that told her that he'd understood exactly what she'd meant.

“It'd only be for the winter,” he said. “I don't think either of us would want to make a home with them.”

“Home,” she murmured as she stared back out at the sea. She couldn't see their island from this part of the coast – not that it had ever really been their island at all – but it still pulled at her heart in a way that her old home, lost at the bottom of the sea, no longer did. The people on that island were the last of the world she'd known, but she'd left them all the same, knowing that she'd probably never see them again, knowing that the certainty of never seeing her brother again would be even worse. And yet, the thought of going back to them all filled her with almost as much dismay as the prospect of living out her life with a tribe of patient and unquestioning hill-people. “I promised I'd go back,” she said. “That I'd _try_ to go back, whether I found you or not – but if we do, I don't think we'll ever leave again.”

“Yeah,” her brother agreed. “We'll be lucky to be let out of sight of the tents.”

She watched the waves breaking on the shoreline, crashing hard and white before rushing in a shallow flood over the eroded ground, all the while trying to convince herself that a life spent on an island surrounded by people she'd known her entire life wouldn't be a bad thing. The tide was coming in again, a reminder to the land that the sea was there to stay. “It's a good island, more than big enough to make a place for us all. The raiders might come again, but we can build towers and walls like the hill-people do and easily make our camp more defensible than the strangers' village. Maybe we could even build a proper castle one day, like the one the scholars were living in. Or make the ruins tall and beautiful again.”

“We could do that.”

“Or we could just stay in a tent for the rest of our lives, farming and gathering and learning how to live in a world where the land is small and the sea is large...instead of the other way around.”

He reached out and took hold of her hand. “You don't want to go back, do you?”

She shook her head, glad that she hadn't needed to be the one to say it. “I want them to know we're both okay...but when I left, all I wanted to do was find you. Now that I have, I _should_ want to go home, I _know_ I should. It's still home, even if it _is_ in a different place. But I don't.” She fell silent and waited, expecting her brother to start trying to persuade her otherwise.

“Everything's different now,” he said. “The sea changed it all.”

“Even me,” she added in a small voice.

Letting go of her hand, her brother picked up a stick and traced out a rectangle in the dirt. Within it he added a series of curving lines, mapping out the un-drowned lands from memory. “It's strange...but I think that I _like_ that it's all changed, that everything's different. We can't pretend to understand things any more. Even ourselves.” He smiled across at her. “You're wrong about one thing though. You haven't changed at all. You still want to understand how the sea works, and everything else.”

“It's so much _bigger_ than it used to be,” she said, looking down at the lines of her brother's map, “but there's still a lot of world left to explore. Places even the scholars on the island didn't know about, out beyond the borders.”

“The sky would know,” he said. “The sky covers everything. Everything we can see, all the way to the horizon, and everything beyond it, too.”

She followed his gaze as he turned on the spot, taking in the slumped headland, the forested hills behind his castle, all the drowned trees that lined the bay, and the wide expanse of sea and sky: pink and white clouds suspended in a pale gold haze above the dark water and the splintered sunlight.

“There could be anything out there,” she said. All the things from the oldest stories, all the wonders she'd ever imagined and a thousand times as many more that she couldn't even begin to touch the surface of. Castles and towers and cities of glass, bridges that spanned great chasms and rooms full of books that you could spend a lifetime reading, insects that shimmered with colour and birds that sang songs you'd never tire of hearing, trees older and taller than the ruins and ingenious human-made devices that did all manner of impossible things.

“ _We_ could be anything, out there,” her brother said. “Anything and everything we choose.”

Delighted by the thought, she laughed. “I wouldn't even know where to start!”

“Nor me. But I think we'll figure it out.”

“Yeah.”

  



	3. Epilogue - Sea and Sky

_“It's them!” she yelled down from the harbour wall. “They're back!”_

_She stayed where she was as the word went out and the rest of the village assembled, watching the ship drawing steadily closer. It soon became obvious that this year's ship was the largest yet. Its hull was broad and patterned in bands of red and black, and its three masts bore colourful streamers in addition to their billowing sails. She held a hand up to her brow to screen her eyes from the sun and tried to spot her cousins amongst the commotion on the deck, wondering what they'd have brought back from their travels this time. Usually one or both of them were easy to spot, but that wasn't true this time._

_And then one of the sailors raised a hand and pointed up towards the clouds. A second sailor did the same, just as the first sailor turned his gesture into a wave, and then the whole ship's company was cheering._

_She turned to look behind her, raising her eyes from the hills all the way up to the heavens overhead, to where the sky-ship was descending through the clouds._

_This time, she promised herself. This time, I'm definitely going too._

**Author's Note:**

> I did the best I could with the images, but...yeah. Stick people are just as hard as scenery! So, they may only be a temporary feature of this story. Traykor, feel free to ask for them to be edited out if you think they don't work/aren't up to it/disrupt the story's flow.


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